sabbatical advice?

Orgheads:

I am going to take a sabbatical in the 2015-16 academic year. On the Facebook group, I asked for input and got one good suggestion. Here, I widen the query. What advice would you give to someone planning a sabbatical? Good places to go? Do’s and don’ts? Other ideas?

Find a peer whose research you are interested in and want to learn something more about. Ask him/her if you could spend your sabbatical at his/her university to start writing on a coauthored paper. It sure helps if you bring along data, if need be. Oh yeah, a host university in a great place is always nice so that you can spend some quality time there, too.

Cross the border and walk into the Canadian Rockies with just a sleeping bag, a knife, and a small aluminum cooking pot. Just before your classes start again 14 months later, come back to civilization having lost a few extremities but learned more than you thought possible about yourself.

Do: learn something for yourself. A language; a subject you liked as an undergrad, but left behind; play the nyckelharpa.

Don’t: plan to stay on campus or return often. Rent out your house so you can’t go home (apologies to Thomas Wolfe)

Do: think about two locations, one in the US and one abroad. Build two new nodes in your network (for future invitations back!)

One friend, who has taken 3 sabbaticals and 4 paid leaves of absence, sweeps everything off the desk and into the trash the week before he leaves and sweeps everything off the desk the day he returns. He maintains that this lowers his stress during the leave by 25% and keeps the “local drudgery” off the calendar for at least one month after the return.

Moving for 10-12 months is no where near twice the amount of work or stress as moving for 5-6 months. It may even be less — e.g., it’s probably easier to rent a house in a college town for a year than it is to rent it for a semester. If there’s any way that you can swing a full year of leave, do it.